Australian Businesses Are Being Targeted
/This morning the Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison called an emergency conference to raise awareness and inform the public of a cyber-attack currently targeting Australian businesses and organisations.
"This activity is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure," he said.
No business is too small to be targeted by this attack so here are some steps you should take immediately to ensure your business is protected:
Make sure all web-facing devices and software are patched and up-to-date. This includes you mobile device, tablet, desktop and laptop and the applications or programs installed on it as well as their operating systems.
Ensure you and your employees have activated and are using multi-factor authentication where possible. We released a handy checklist earlier in the week that goes through commonly used cloud services and has links to instruction for how to activate MFA.
If you believe you have been breached, change all passwords where possible to something unique and complex for each account. Use a password manager like LastPass if you struggle to remember passwords.
Unfortunately, cyber attacks are not uncommon in the world we live in today and they are unlikely to disappear any time soon. Cyber Security can seem daunting but if you just start with one thing today, you're business will be more secure tomorrow.
Some Handy Tools For You
Hope on over to our Free Resources page to check out our checklists and guides for activating Multi-Factor Authentication, being Cyber Fit at home and Securing you Personal Device
Check out this mornings Blog Post about Password Behaviours and what you can do tot minimise your risk
Check out our 15 Types of Cyber Attacks Series so you and your team can known what to look out for!
UTM Firewalls
Our firewall partners have just recently started offering monthly subscriptions for UTM firewalls. Not sure what a UTM Firewall is?
The term UTM firewall or simply UTM (Unified Threat management) is the nomenclature given to a hardware or software device capable of assembling various security functions, such as packet filtering, proxy, intrusion detection and prevention systems, protection against malware, application control, among others.
Previously the cost of these UTM firewalls has meant they were not within budget for many small businesses. Now any small business can have access to the enterprise-grade security these UTM firewalls to secure their business. If you're interested in knowing more, send us a message here and we'll send you some more information.